Broken Elections, Stolen Votes – Part Four
A second messy election: Ohio 2004
BY Susan Q. Stranahan | July 03, 2008
A week before the Election Day 2004, election experts were making no secret of their concern.
“I am really, really worried,” Doug Lewis of the nonpartisan Election Center, an advisory group for election officials, told The Wall Street Journal. “We’re all on our knees — ‘Dear Lord, let the winner win big, whoever it is.’”
The nightmare scenario was another near dead-heat election freighted with the kind of suspicious election tactics and crude voting machinery that led the U.S. Supreme Court to settle the 2000 Florida election, making George W. Bush the 43rd president in an unprecedented 5-4 decision. In 2004 Bush was running for reelection, partisan feelings were at a fever pitch, and Ohio had become the do-or-die destination for political activists. And the Ohio voting machinery was just as primitive.
Now, four years further on, with people still arguing whether the 2004 Ohio election was any more or less legitimate than the 2000 Florida election, and with another crucial presidential election less than six months away, people are worrying again. The nation’s confidence in its elections has been shaken. And this new round of the complex quadrennial dance of democracy known as presidential elections — and the “buying of the president” — faces new challenges.
In the aftermath of the Florida election mess, Congress decided it was time to bring some order to the nation’s election system. In the House, the Help America Vote Act was sponsored by Ohio Republican Bob Ney. (In 2006, Ney would plead guilty to soliciting and accepting campaign contributions and favors such as expensive meals, travel, and sports tickets from lobbyists, including Jack Abramoff, in exchange for official acts, including introducing amendments to bills, inserting statements into the Congressional Record, and lobbying other federal officials. In his guilty plea, Ney specifically admitted that he had agreed to insert amendments into the Help America Vote Act to benefit three of Abramoff’s clients and a religious school founded by Abramoff. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison.) In the Senate, Christopher Dodd, Democrat from Connecticut, sponsored a similar bill. When he signed the measure in late October 2002, President Bush said, “Every registered voter deserves to have confidence that the system is fair and elections are honest, that every vote is recorded, and that the rules are consistently applied.” Congress approved spending $3.86 billion over three years to upgrade voting equipment and create statewide voter registration systems.
“Election administrators, who had rarely been graced with enough money for lead pencils, much less six- or nine-figure windfalls, could not believe their luck,” wrote journalist Andrew Gumbel. “With dollar signs dancing in their eyes, they wasted no time in grabbing their coats and going shopping.” On occasion, they saw some familiar faces on the other side of the counter. Among them was Sandra Mortham, who was Florida’s secretary of state before Katherine Harris defeated her in a Republican primary in time to supervise the state’s controversy-riddled 2000 voting. After leaving office Mortham became a lobbyist for Election Systems & Software (ES&S), the largest voting machine manufacturer in the United States. She also was serving as a lobbyist for the Florida Association of Counties, which exclusively endorsed ES&S equipment for purchase. Then ES&S sold 12 Florida counties more than $70 million worth of machines in 2001 and 2002. Mortham got a commission on each transaction; Broward County alone paid more than $17 million to ES&S, from which Mortham received $172,000.
Ohio was also in the market for new equipment, and the favored vendor was a local firm, Diebold Inc., headquartered in North Canton. The company was headed by Walden O’Dell, whose work as a high-ticket fundraiser for the Bush-Cheney reelection effort earned him a stay at the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. In the summer of 2003, as Ohio was evaluating which vendors would provide $100 million worth of new voting machines, computer security researchers announced that the Diebold machines were easy marks for hackers. A short time later, the news media got wind of the fact that O’Dell had sent out invitations for a $1,000-a-plate Republican fundraiser, noting that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”
Democrats pounced on the news. Security concerns eventually led Ohio to delay its purchase of electronic voting machines. As a result, 68 of Ohio’s 88 counties would continue to use old punch-card voting machines like those that had created so many problems in Florida. In that regard, Ohio wasn’t alone. Despite the grand promises of billions in federal money to modernize equipment in time for the next presidential election, as of May 2004, only $670 million had been disbursed.
But now the nation is finally responding to the need for better voting machinery. Election Data Services, a consulting firm that tracks voting technology, reports that many states are turning to paper ballots and optical scanners, and that when voters go to the polls this November only those in 12 counties in Idaho will encounter punch-card ballots.
Running the show in Ohio was Republican Secretary of State Ken BlackwellBut new kinds of voting equipment and the likelihood of a heavy turnout as political passions run high introduces the potential for error — and more controversy. “Since 2000, upwards of 70 to 75 percent of the nation has changed voting equipment,” Kimball W. Brace, president of Election Data Services, told The Boston Globe. “Every time you make a change, it has the potential of causing problems. . . . Inevitably, the biggest problems occur the first time you use new equipment.”
No Republican had ever gone to the White House without carrying the Buckeye State. “For Karl Rove, the president’s chief political adviser, and the rest of the Bush team, Ohio [in 2004 was] beginning to look a lot like Florida without the oranges,” wrote Matt Bai, who covered the presidential race for The New York Times Magazine. As a measure of just how vital Ohio’s 20 electoral votes were to both Bush and his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry, the candidates made a total of 49 campaign visits, more than to any other state.
Running the show in Ohio was Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, as devout a GOP foot soldier as Harris had been in Florida four years earlier. Blackwell served as co-chair of the Bush reelection committee in Ohio and made no secret of his ambitions for the governorship. He did run in 2006 but went down to defeat with only 37 percent of the vote.
Ohio became ground zero for party apparatchiks and high-priced consultants. The Democratic Party focused on strengthening its traditional base in the state’s urban centers. Democrats, liberal activists, labor unions, and 527 groups (the new players on the political scene in 2004, so named for the section of the Internal Revenue Service code recognizing them), registered hundreds of thousands of new voters. Chief among the 527s in Ohio was America Coming Together, bankrolled by the Service Employees International Union and wealthy liberals such as financier George Soros. ACT and its political action committee raised $217 million nationwide for the 2004 election and had 20,000 volunteers on the street in Ohio on Election Day. In large measure, as required by the campaign finance laws, they worked independently of the Kerry campaign.
The Republicans, under the leadership of strategist Rove, focused on building a regimented hierarchy that was compared to the Amway sales model. Each new volunteer was expected to recruit others, who were then expected sign up additional recruits. The Republicans worked on cementing support within the new exurban communities spreading out from places like Cleveland, Toledo, and Cincinnati.
Offsetting the Democrats’ registration efforts, Blackwell, the secretary of state, approved a massive purge of voter rolls in the state’s big cities. The names of more than 300,000 people who had not voted in two previous national elections were expunged. Newly registered voters were targeted by the Republican National Committee and state GOP officials. The Ohio Republican Party mailed more than 200,000 letters to new voters, urging them to vote Republican. About 30,000 of them were returned as undeliverable, allowing Republican volunteers to challenge more than 35,000 voters, primarily in minority urban areas, on the ground that there was evidence that they did not live where they claimed to live.
In early September, less than a month before the filing deadline, Blackwell announced that election officials would process new registrations only if they were printed on 80-pound white paper stock. He later rescinded his rule — six days before the registration deadline. Blackwell also gave local election officials broad authority to deny would-be voters the right to cast a ballot, an act a federal appeals court ultimately ruled illegal, but which created massive confusion on Election Day.
“Blackwell made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake,” Representative John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat who held hearings on problems with the Ohio vote, told Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., during his lengthy deconstruction of the 2004 election published by Rolling Stone.
On Election Day, the Republican Party deployed 3,600 operatives who fanned out to 32 Ohio counties — most of them predominately black and urban — to watch for vote fraud. In a legal battle that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Republican workers were allowed into the polling places themselves to challenge voters’ eligibility. But with this victory in hand, Republican officials said their workers would primarily be observers, not active challengers, and apparently they did not cause significant disruptions at the polls.
Representative John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, said Ken Blackwell “made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake.”The Democrats also dispatched troops to front lines across the country. “Right now we have 10,000 lawyers out in the battleground states on Election Day,” boasted Michael Whouley, who served as Kerry’s political strategist. Joining the partisan poll-watchers were nearly 1,000 observers from the U.S. Department of Justice, delegated to enforce civil rights laws. Also standing by were more than 1,300 computer experts, volunteers from the NAACP and People for the American Way, and hundreds of law-school students. About 4 million votes had been “lost” in the 2000 election due to confusing ballots, equipment glitches, and disenfranchised voters, according to researchers at the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project. The watchdogs on both sides weren’t about to let that happen again. But rather than smoothing out the process, the massive deployment practically guaranteed an adversarial outcome.
“The woods really aren’t any drier in 2004 than they were four years ago, but more people have matches,” said Doug Chapin, director of the nonpartisan electionline.org.
And Ohio offered plenty of tinder. On Election Day, voting machines were scarce and lines were long in many low-income precincts. Statewide, black voters reported waiting an average of 52 minutes to vote, compared with 18 for white voters. In a number of locations, voters were forced to stand in line for hours in the rain. Democrats charged that identification requirements were illegally administered, and nearly two out of three black men were required to show identification. Acceptance of provisional ballots varied widely from precinct to precinct.
Was the 2004 election stolen in Ohio? As with Florida in 2000, it is a debate that may never come to a conclusion, so deep is the partisan divide.
In his extensive investigation of the events in Ohio for Rolling Stone, Kennedy, whose political leanings are obvious, had no doubts. “I’ve become convinced that the president’s party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004,” he wrote. The New York Times found just the opposite: “There is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.” The Washington Post labeled allegations of massive fraud as the “latest conspiracy theory.” The disparity of views on the subject devolved into a mini-war pitting Internet bloggers against the “mainstream media,” which came in for intense criticism on the web for failing to pursue what many believed was overwhelming evidence of vote fraud.
Ultimately, however, one fact remained: Kerry conceded the election to Bush. “The 2004 election exceeded the margin of litigation in states such as Ohio, North Carolina, Texas, and elsewhere because President George W. Bush won the states by enough votes that the problems encountered, if resolved, would most likely not have changed the outcome,” concluded the nonpartisan electionline.org. That view was shared by others, including the Democratic National Committee, which after a five-month study concluded that Kerry still would not have garnered enough votes to defeat Bush if things had gone smoothly in Ohio. The study also cited the myriad of problems that had plagued the election process — especially difficulties encountered by minority and younger voters — which cast a cloud over the integrity of the process and those who administered it.